Amazon to wrangle babysitting, home repair startups into a marketplace

With retail on lock, Amazon wants in on the service industry.

Amazon has plans to start a "marketplace for local services," according to a report from Reuters Tuesday. The service would connect customers to people and companies that provide services like home repair and baby sitting that will be hirable and guaranteed through Amazon.

Reuters points out that acting as a middleman to sell service providers to customers has become a popular business, with Home Depot and Lowe's offering to find their customers workers for plumbing and painting. Home Depot got in on this market when it purchased the startup Redbeacon in 2012. Amazon may also integrate customer reviews into the process, à la Yelp and Angie's List.

While the latter two services often provide contact info, they don't manage the actual hiring process. According to Reuters' report, Amazon would not only facilitate the transactions but guarantee the service with its "A-to-Z Guarantee" that it uses for its third-party retailers.

Amazon's interest in making a marketplace mirrors not only Home Depot's and Lowe's but also the rise of general-purpose assistant services. Sites and apps like TaskRabbit and FancyHands that allow users to hire workers to complete tasks, have grown in popularity.

Amazon's theorized marketplace compares pretty closely to TaskRabbit and FancyHands in that it handles the hiring of service people, rather than providing the service people itself (FancyHands cautions that it can't send someone to clean your house, though you can hire someone to find someone to clean your house). Amazon itself has dabbled in the service industry a bit with Mechanical Turk, though that's typically for tasks that can be done remotely and quickly for a few cents each.

Amazon has reportedly reached out to service providers and startups in Seattle and San Francisco about partnering with them in the service. The market it's reaching into appears to be booming: one possible ally is the Seattle-based Porch.com, a service that connects customers to service people like landscapers and electricians. Lowe's quietly partnered with Porch to offer its services back in April.

Since Reuters specifically mentions babysitting, another potential partner is Tonightish, an app that connects people with babysitters. The startup's founder, Susie Kroll, is a former employee of Amazon and Microsoft. San Francisco-based UrbanSitter could also be on the table, having just raised $13 million and expanded its services beyond the city. Another home-service startup, ClubLocal, raised more than $10 million in February. Reuters mentioned that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally invested in Pro.com, a startup for getting estimates and professionals for housework.

How Amazon would integrate the startups into its own marketplace isn't quite clear. The startups are already one layer of abstraction between a business and a service person, and if Amazon wants to market the startup, it would be a service (Amazon), offering a service (the startup), offering a service (the actual professional). The model works similarly for third-party retailers, except at the bottom level of abstraction, the retailer sells inanimate objects that can't advocate for themselves the way, say, a babysitter could. It seems likely that Amazon would also allow independent parties into the marketplace, though they may not receive favorable placement the way, say, UrbanSitter might.

Reuters states that the marketplace will tie in with products sold on Amazon, and that the company recently ran a test by offering installation services to Nest thermostats sold on the site. If Reuters' sources are correct, Amazon's marketplace will launch later this year.